bitter paradise
by thoughts-of-joy-dreams-of-love
Summary: "he kisses her, and she's sure she never knew life before him. he kisses her, and she's sure she never knew death before him, either." oneshot, in which melchior and wendla fall together.
_"...but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you didn't even have a name for."_ \- richard siken, _crush_

-:-

every time his eyes meets hers it's with an apocalyptic intensity, and _oh,_ her heart whispers, _this must be how people fall in love._

-:-

wendla bergmann is a lovely young girl. she is the faint pink-white at the edge of a sunrise, the comet that dies softly against the canvas of night, the opening bud of an pallid rose. she is ignorant and fragmentary and she feels so fucking trapped, like she's stuck in a box with a black veil pulled around it, obscuring all except for insignificant matters, dull and weightless as cobwebs. outside, she thinks she can sense unknown things that are heady and dark and _alive_. she longs to understand, but isn't sure what she doesn't understand. she wants for something, but doesn't know what it is.

melchior knows what he wants.

he wants to touch her.

-:-

all the girls at school fantasize over him. _melchior gabor_ , they swoon in a chorus, and though wendla does not talk of boys so freely, she understands. she understands completely. she and melchior have lived mostly on the peripheries of each other's lives, but when she sees him, she cannot shake the impression he leaves on her; a hot-cold draft that pulses in her chest for half an hour afterwards.

she imagines him as a storm cloud frozen in time just before the lightning strikes. he is all tension and hunger and cynicism, but _so_ handsome, and girls have never been able to resist those smart, brooding, riptide-boys, have they? not with that dark, tousled hair and those whitewhite forearms engraved with veins. wendla thinks he looks like michelangelo's _david,_ perhaps infused with a bit more boyishness and misery.

everyone says he is an absolute radical and the most intelligent boy in the entire school, his mind roving somewhere far beyond any of them. he is trailed by a kind of sepulchral, humming danger that warns as much as it flirts, and wendla - wendla thinks of him all too often.

when she comes across him in the woods and he says "wendla bergmann? like a tree-nymph fallen from the branches. what are you doing alone up here?" something tells that she should go, that the danger trailing him will pass off to _her_ \- but the feeling doesn't do much more than float in the back of her mind, and shadows moves across his tall form in blurry shivers and she finds herself drawn beside him. she listens to him talk, his voice and hands seeming to emit a fervent energy, as if he is filled with so much intensity his human body can't contain it all. she likes that. she likes his bleak eyes and the scent of woodsmoke and ink mingling on his skin; she likes the way his shoulders fill out his shirt and the harshdark bristle of his eyelashes. she didn't know boys could be beautiful.

there is a strange, torrid feeling inside her that she doesn't understand but it feels a lot like _want._ melchior is looking at her like he could devour her whole, and the bizarre urge to count his vertebrae and press her fingertips against his lips flitters across her mind. wendla feels frightened. hot. breathless. fascinated. alive. and close, too close, to melchior gabor and the ever-climbing expanse of his soul.

she goes, and doesn't know she's left him inhaling her woodruff scent and thinking about her black hair dripping between his fingers.

-:-

melchior dreams of wendla both awake and asleep. he dreams of the two of them with faintly bloody lips, two pairs of lungs gasping for the same air, his fingers decorating her lily-soft hips with bruises. he dreams of her tongue on the ridged roof of his mouth, of those black-stockinged legs folded around him, of poppies blooming in her cheeks and kisses that taste like salt and forever, kisses that taste like anywhere away from this fucking empty life he's stuck in. he dreams of heat and night and _sensation,_ sensation so strong it maybe hurts or it maybe doesn't but it's at least violent enough to rip him and wendla out of this numb, numb world. he dreams of furtive, greedy, matchstick touches, and at any other time he knows that wendla is simply pretty, no legendary beauty, but in the torrent of those dreams he's convinced not even delilah or venus could've looked so incredible.

she comes to him in the woods again one day, this time very pale and with a sort of morbidity shifting in her eyes. melchior feels sparks crackle and burst in his palms as soon as she comes into view. he wonders if he would feel this way if it were any other girl, but doesn't concern himself with it for long. wendla is the one who has crossed into his orbit, and so wendla is the one he dreams of breaking all the rules with.

this time, she speaks of strange things, of fathers beating their daughters with belts and melchior tells her that those kind of things don't happen anymore. she insists, saying "martha bessell is beaten almost every evening - the next day you can see the welts." part of melchior bothers to feel sad, but the other part is just irritated that he's gotten something wrong. he knows he's probably a terrible person for it, but he's a terrible person who likes to be _right._

"i've tried hitting myself - to find out how it feels, really, inside." she says to him, her voice far away. her eyes are drawn to a switch on the ground and she picks it up. "with this switch, for example. it's tough, and thin." she hands it to him, quietly, like she is giving an offering to a god.

melchior doesn't know what to think of this wendla. he is used to sweet, mild wendla, the perfect image of the good kept-in-the-dark schoolgirl she is expected to be, with just a _hint_ of potential debauchery to make her interesting. but this wendla is waxen and spectral and fixated on a pain she can't even imagine.

he takes the switch in his hand and slices it through the air with a whistle. "it'd draw blood."

"you mean...if you beat me with it?"

melchior really looks at her then, at this innocent who has had his hands all over her in his panting dreams. she's got nerves and desperation scrawled all across her skin; a shaky little girl who had all the feeling scooped out of her long ago - _by the parentocracy,_ melchior thinks, _just like the rest of us._ he sees the penumbra of her (his, _everyone's_ ) teenage sorrow resting on her face and feels closer to her than ever. _dear wendla, you have more in common with "the radical" than you realize._ he sees so clearly how they both just want to _feel_ and to be free from this placid, aching existence, and to just - to just _transcend_ or something, and he thinks of his dream-wendla's bruised skin - but no, no, he couldn't actually _beat_ her, for god's sake -

they go back and forth, him refusing and her wheedling, and melchior grows more and more confused and his heart throbs and he slowly feels himself being swayed - he wants something different, doesn't he? well, it's not every goddamn day a girl asks to be hit with a switch just to feel _anything_.

wendla clutches at his shirt, half-crying and as utterly disoriented as he is. she wants so badly to understand the world in its completeness, to know what dark underbelly is being hidden from her like she is still nothing more than a child. if that means understanding what it's like to be beaten, she will do it. she will do it. and they both feel young and desolate and sick to their stomachs, but they at least they know they're alive for it.

melchior takes the switch to her legs.

-:-

she comes to him one last time, now in a dark, airless hayloft instead of the woods.

he kisses her, and she's sure she never knew life before him.

he kisses her, and she's sure she never knew death before him, either.

-:-

 **yeah...i don't really know what the hell this is either. this is my first time writing spring awakening fic, so i hope i did the characters justice. i don't usually completely forgo capital letters, but it was sort of an aesthetic choice.**

 **if you made it this far, please leave a review and let me know what you think, _especially_ if you bother to follow/favorite! :)**


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